Incomplete Revolution

By: Mariah Boone
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:24:14
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I was recently riding in the car with my family while reading the Winter 2006 issue of Brain, Child Magazine. I had to read aloud a letter in the magazine from a mother in Hungary who detailed the amazing benefits that country provides to its citizens so that everyone can take care of their children well and feel secure in their jobs and their families. My ten-year-old daughter, who has heard similar descriptions of the amazing benefits available to families in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and a host of European countries, was impressed. Hungary’s list, which included three-year maternity leaves and free daycare for all, sounded even better than the lists of benefits from Sweden and the countries we already envied. My daughter was ready to move, so it fell to me to remind her that Hungary, like the other countries we had heard about, was not going to accept us as immigrants. Their education systems were not in crisis and their children were not impoverished, after all. My husband is a teacher and I am a social worker – there is plenty of work for us here in the United States, but Hungary and Sweden just don’t need us.

The United States is pretty much the only wealthy, industrialized nation on the globe that does not recognize its responsibility to support families through policies that allow people to spend with their families the sort of time that children need to grow up secure enough to develop their full potentials while still allowing both parents to make contributions in the world of work and to take adequate care of themselves. The United States, for reasons difficult to understand, prefers a system in which the government provides no such policies that could truly lift a family up to security, preferring to leave families who are not blessed with an abundance of wealth and the choices it confers with only two: your women or your children. One of them is going to have to do without. In fact, in the long run, both may have to do without. None of that subversive family support stuff, no – those standards of living are not for us. Women will either stay home to care for their children and forego the benefits they need to be economically secure, often working part-time with no benefits to keep the family afloat, or they will participate in a rat race that does not allow them the time to be the mothers they know their children need except at great cost to their own health and sanity. Fathers who are primary or equal caregivers of their children face similar “choices”. Is it any wonder that we experience more violence and crime than the countries that actively support families? We are stressed out people here.

My mother’s generation was part of the second wave of feminism. They made some amazing progress in their time. Their focus was on equal rights for women under the law, and their greatest accomplishments were in the arena of gaining women access to the world of careers and almost equal treatment in it. The second-wavers were amazing; they made it clear that women can do anything that men can do and before many of their daughters were even born, women were out there doing it – everything that men could do…and more. To those like me, though, who believe that third wave feminism is about issues and not some spunky grrrl style trends, things seemed to get stuck there. Showing men that we could do everything that they could do was necessary to gain access to the power structure, but it was hardly a place to stop and be satisfied. Men could do all that they used to do alone because they had wives at home who were raising their children and making homes for them. Since those things still have to get done, we cannot really settle for the old man’s model unless we plan to send someone, woman or man, back into that role. These days, most women and some men are stuck in an impossible place. Our culture’s career-model leaves no time for children and choosing to care for children instead is a sure road to dependency on a spouse who might not always be there and a probable road to poverty. Everyone works too hard to try to make this model work, especially mothers who are starting to find themselves victim to a number of weird autoimmune disorders and syndromes as they run themselves into the ground. It does not feel liberating. It feels as if our revolution got stuck somewhere before it was finished. Somewhere scary and exhausting. So, what is next then? How do we move forward? What is the third wave of feminism?

The third wave of feminism is family feminism…it is about mothers and what we need to make our lives, lives that include work and children and even other interests, actually work. It involves dropping our fear of admitting that we may have different needs than the men of our fathers’ generation, maybe even than the men of our own generation sometimes since they don’t gestate babies or breastfeed them, and speaking up for a liberation that empowers us to have what we actually want…economic security, time to be there for our children, fulfilling work and an equal say about how our society functions. We need to acknowledge and respect that we want these things in different ways, in differing portions, in different seasons of our lives…and that we all deserve to have real choices about them, not the sort of choices we are making now, among lesser evils that don’t feel free. Most of all, it involves a society that is committed to mothers having freedom, too, one that provides the sort of benefits that all other free societies have…supports for parents and children, that recognize that we are all in this together.

It may seem silly, but it was actually only a couple of months ago when I truly came to believe that I would not have these things for myself. I am the mother of a ten-year-old and a toddler and I have been writing and publishing and fighting for these things for as long as I can remember. I thought I would have them in my lifetime…a job that gave me the time I needed with my kids and freedom from the constant fear that I will not be able to keep this family afloat financially. I thought I would have it while my kids still needed real mothering. It was magical thinking, that fantasy, and one day, not very long ago, it just fell from my eyes and I saw the truth. I do not remember what prompted my little epiphany, but I do remember that I was in my car and that I just cried and cried for a while. It made all that I had worked so hard for seem so pointless. I could not see how that job with the right balance would matter once my kids were all grown up and I did not mind fifty-hour weeks anymore. What was the point of this whole life’s work, then?

I realized almost immediately what the point is…and then I cried some more. The point is my daughters, if it cannot be me. Like so many U.S. mothers, I do not have the time my daughters need from me right now, and I know now that I will not have it while they are still young enough to need it. The fight is still for them, though. They will be the mothers one day and I do not want them to be similarly torn and shackled. I want them to have what Hungary and Sweden have without having to move there. So I have to keep fighting. I have to get our feminism unstuck and moving onward to our daughters’ tomorrows. This is the third wave, my third wave: welcome back to the revolution.

(This article first appeared in off our backs: the feminist news journal)

Mariah Boone is a mother, writer, social worker, Texas historian and the publisher of Lone Star Ma: The Magazine of Progressive Texas Parenting and Children's Issues. To read more, go to http://www.LoneStarMa.com.

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